“It is the universal hope of rising in the social scale which is the key to much of the superiority that is visible in this country. It accounts for the orderly self-respect which is the great characteristic of the masses in the United States. ... All this tends to the argument that the political condition of a people is very much dependent on its economical fate.”

— Richard Cobden

Letter to John Bright during his visit to the United States (1858), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden [1879] (1905), p. 688
1850s

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Richard Cobden 56

English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman 1804–1865

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